"He's one of the world's great people," said Rick Zitelman, a Rockville investment and merchant banker. Zitelman and his wife, Cindy, helped buy one of Youlus's Torahs for Sixth and I Historic Synagogue on the edge of the District's Chinatown.
Youlus -- who has a Web site devoted to his mission, www.saveatorah.org -- estimates that as many as 2,400 scrolls survived the Holocaust. He believes so strongly in saving them that he has gone into debt $170,000 to finance his work, he said.
Rabbi Menachem Youlus, left, dedicates a restored Torah at the Sixth And I Historic Synagogue in honor of Josef B. and Ellen W. Ducat. Also present are Stan Cohen, wife Sue Ducat and daughter Hannah Cohen, 11. The Torah was recovered by Youlus in Poland.
(Photos Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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"He doesn't see it as a sacrifice," Zitelman said of Youlus using his own money. "He just sees it as his life's mission."
Perhaps nothing captures the intrigue and often profound sadness of Torah rescue as Youlus's gruesome discovery in Kamenets-Poldosk, a small town in Ukraine.
Youlus went there in spring 2000 to meet with an antiques dealer who had a Torah. That deal fell through, but while sitting outside the store drinking a soda, he said, a farmer approached him, offering to sell him a map. The farmer said his father had told him to offer the map to someone wearing a yarmulke.
Youlus said he bought the map for $1,500. "My driver thought I was pretty nutty, but I had a gut feeling," Youlus said.
The hand-drawn map, marked with an "X" surrounded by a large circle, led to an overgrown area of the man's farm. Youlus said the farmer made him pay $1,500 more to buy the plot of land before he could dig on it.
In two hours, Youlus said, he, his driver and the farmer came across the bones. He eventually hired a company with a backhoe and unearthed the mass grave with the hidden Torahs.
"That was a little more than I bargained for," Youlus said.
Elderly people in the town recalled four Jewish men being forced to bury the massacred bodies, Youlus said. Those men likely saved the Torahs from a nearby synagogue by wrapping them in the body bags and sneaking them into the grave.
Youlus said he spent several more weeks helping to rebury the remains in separate plots. He also found five more pre-Holocaust Torahs in nearby towns, hidden in basements or kept by non-Jews.
He credits his zeal for Torah rescue to a "deal" he struck with God 21 years ago. He was a 22-year-old accountant in New York when his father and his sister's boyfriend were struck by a car while crossing a road near their Montgomery County synagogue.
Youlus said doctors told him to begin making burial arrangements. If God would save their lives, he prayed, he would devote a year to studying the Torah. Both men survived.
He didn't know then, he said, that he would end up devoting the rest of his life to saving it.
Staff researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
